Censorship Of Mark Twain's The Adventure Of Huckleberry Finn

Essay by otis07uoHigh School, 11th gradeA, May 2009

download word file, 5 pages 1.0

Mark Twain'sThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is offensive, rude, ignorant, ungrammatical, insensitive, and a timeless masterpiece that should never be subject to censorship in any form or capacity. Twain's novel deals with controversial issues such as slavery, racism and bigotry. There are vulgar, racist, uncivilized and uncensored characters that speak and act in ways we find unimaginable today. African Americans are treated not as people, but as objects. However these things lend accuracy to the time period in which the book was written and are necessary to make it a valuable resource for educating people about racism. Twain himself was not a racist, and he opposed slavery, which further supports the argument against censorship. To censor books such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because they deal with racism and slavery is to bury our heads in the ground and refuse to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Slavery is unarguably the greatest injustice ever imposed on African-Americans in the history of the Americas, however it is history, and censoring literature portraying the customs of the time period is unacceptable. Instead, Works of historical fiction such as Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should be regarded as valuable teaching tools, and utilized to their full extent. To censor a piece of literature because it depicts slaves as uneducated is ridiculous. If Twain were to have portrayed Jim as anything other than a stereotypical "stupid" slave it would do away with any trace of historical credence the book carries. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a work of fiction, but its setting and the circumstances of the setting are very real. It was Thomas Jefferson who said "Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and discussion are the antidotes of...